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Bulletin, December 2008/January 2009

Inside ASIS&T

New Officers and Directors Join ASIS&T Board

Every year at the ASIS&T Annual Meeting, a new administrative year begins, and the first official order of business is the introduction of new faces to the ASIS&T Board of Directors. In October in Columbus, the annual changing of the guard took place, and new officers and directors took their seats.

Each of the positions filled through recent balloting is for a three-year term. Those elected to the Board are
Gary Marchionini, president-elect; and Debbie Barreau and Peter Morville, directors-at-large. In addition,
Amy Wallace joined the Board as Chapter Assembly Director as a result of balloting conducted among chapter representatives.

As the new members took their seats,
Donald Case, elected last year as president-elect, assumed the presidency from
Nancy Roderer, who remains on the Board as past president for one year.

Gary Marchionini, professor of information science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has served ASIS&T in numerous ways, including on the Board of Directors; on various standing and ad hoc committees; and on the editorial board of
JASIST. In his position statement issued in the ballot materials, Marchionini focused on the importance of growing the ASIS&T membership and in strengthening ASIS&T’s role and participation in summits and meetings devoted to significant topics in information science.

Deborah Barreau, associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been active in ASIS&T chapters and SIGs since joining in 1988. She has served on numerous committees and awards juries and has worked on ASIS&T annual meetings. In 2002 she received the ASIS&T Outstanding Information Science Award. Her election platform and position statement focused primarily on increasing membership, including student membership, and engaging more members in the life of the association.

Peter Morville is widely recognized as a founder of the information architecture field. His best-selling books include
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, co-authored with Louis Rosenfeld, and
Ambient Findability. He is called upon to deliver seminars and speeches at conferences and leading institutions throughout the world. Morville’s position statement emphasized the importance of maintaining a strong, enduring relationship between ASIS&T and the information architecture community.

ASIS&T 2008 Annual Meeting Coverage
As this issue of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology is being prepared for online access, members of ASIS&T gathered in Columbus for the 2008 Annual Meeting. Complete coverage of the meeting will be included in the February/March 2009 issue of the
Bulletin. To provide a brief glimpse of meeting coverage for those who didn’t attend the meeting, here are the winners of the 2008 ASIS&T Awards. More details will be provided next issue.

Don Kraft Named Editor Emeritus of JASIST
At the meeting of the Editorial Board of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), incoming editor Blaise Cronin announced that Donald Kraft has been named editor emeritus of the
Journal. Kraft retires as editor-in-chief after 24 years of service on January 1, 2009. Cronin was named as his replacement in June.

Kraft’s numerous accolades from both ASIS&T and the information profession include the 2007 ASIS&T Award of Merit, recognizing his contributions to JASIST, among other achievements. In the words of the citation:

That JASIST continues to reign as a top-ranked journal in quantitative and qualitative assessments is a tribute to Dr. Kraft’s leadership. He has steered the Journal into electronic publication and more than doubled the number of issues and quadrupled the number of pages published each year. Dr. Kraft’s editorship has been characterized by expanded international reach and receptivity to new approaches and areas of research.

Throughout his editorship, Dr. Kraft has had the vision to recognize these trends and encourage a very wide range of authors from many fields to publish in the
Journal. He has thus promoted the formation, clarification and extension of the field of information science as we move through times of rapid and profound social and technological transformation. As a consequence of his leadership and considerable people skills, the Journal has grown substantially under his direction, bringing a wider understanding of the field to the discipline of information science.

On accepting the editorship, Cronin also paid tribute to Kraft’s tenure:

JASIST is the preeminent journal of its kind in the world, and the enduring record of our field’s intellectual focus and evolution. Under Don Kraft’s editorship
JASIST has flourished, growing in terms of size, number of annual issues and breadth of subject coverage. The institutional, geographic and disciplinary affiliations of contributing authors are more varied than ever, reflecting the internationalizing of interest in information science and also the perceived attractiveness of
JASIST as a publication outlet of first, not last, resort. In short, the maturation of our field, both scholastically and professionally, is mirrored in the pages of the journal.

News from ASIS&T Chapters
The Northern Ohio ASIS&T chapter (NORASIST) featured Ed Dale, who runs the Ernst & Young intranet, at its annual meeting in October. Dale spoke about information retrieval in an intranet environment and the specific challenges the technology presents.

News about ASIS&T Members
Don Kraft, outgoing editor of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology has been named an ACM Distinguished Scientist for 2008, an ACM membership level recognizing members who have achieved significant accomplishments or have made a significant impact on the computing field.

Amanda Spink, professor at the Queensland University of Technology Faculty of Science and Information Technology, has been appointed associate editor of the Elsevier journal
Information Sciences. The journal publishes basic investigations in the areas of information science focusing on informatics and computer science, Information technologies, intelligent systems and applications.

We live in a culture where countries, organizations and individuals have never been so closely linked politically, economically and socially, linkages that are founded on rapid and efficient information transfer and access. Yet we also co-exist in a world that displays its rich cultural diversity and relies upon information sharing to reinforce its plurality. ASIS&T 2009 offers participants the opportunity to explore how information research and practice can promote global communication while maintaining diversity.

Submissions by researchers and practitioners are sought across the spectrum of information science and technology. Possible topics include, but are not limited, to the following:

Individual identities and how they are transformed by the impact of information technologies

The societal archive – is it disappearing and/or being marginalized?

Societal attentions and how emphasis on information technology either allows or hinders these

Openness, access and privacy issues

Generational, economic and socio-cultural dimensions of the impact of information on people’s lives

Cognitive and emotional aspects of interactions with information

Reshaping the boundary between personal and public information space

The effect of collective information creation on authority and trust

Information by the people for the people

Role of information in connecting people and community building

Types of Submissions
The program committee will accept the following types of submissions:

Contributed papers present original, unpublished papers reporting on research projects, theoretical developments or innovative practical applications are invited. These papers should be reports of completed or well-developed projects on topics suitable for publication in scholarly and professional journals.

Contributed posters may be of either of two types: contributed research posters presenting new and promising work or preliminary results of research projects or contributed “best practices” posters presenting the results of design projects, practical implementations of an organization’s practices or industry innovations.

Technical sessions and panels present topics for discussion such as cutting-edge research and design, analyses of emerging trends, opinions on controversial issues, reports by practitioners on current information science and technology projects, and contrasting viewpoints from experts in complementary professional areas. Innovative formats that involve audience participation are encouraged.

Pre-conference sessions present topics such as theoretical research, management strategies and new and innovative systems or products, typically for purposes of concept development or continuing education.

2009 AM Conference Committee
The following people are serving ASIS&T as members of the 2009 AM Conference Committee:

Andrew Large, McGill University, chair; France Bouthillier, McGill University, and Corinne Jorgensen, Florida State University, contributed papers co-chairs; KT Vaughan, University of North Carolina, and Pascal Calarco, University of Notre Dame, panels and technical sessions co-chairs; Heidi Julien, University of Alberta, and Valerie Nesset, State University of New York at Buffalo, posters co-chairs; and Karen Fisher, University of Washington; Grant Campbell, University of Western Ontario; June Abbas, University of Oklahoma; Luanne Freund, University of British Columbia; Sandra Hirsh, Microsoft Corporation; and Tao Jin, Louisiana State University.